Happy First of February Gentlemen and Ladies...!
Progress has been of the slow and dull type...-- lost of fiddly work with no real tangible progress ( it seems !)
...though in reality it a lot of very small completions-some better than others-(!)-which in the end do add up to progress.
Lorna Doone and her sistership Solent Queen had fine black and white lines between the back and white portions of the hull
.... as various images at various ( as yet undated !!) stages of the 3 years of operations show varying widths of line... (!!!??!)
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this white line is
much wider , thought the other proportions do also vary slightly...
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I did not even try and attempt to mask this for painting--
the Parallel lines being 0.20mm and 0.15 mm respectively-- ( or so...)
This hurdle nearly scuppered the project for me --as my usual source of using of very fine decal lines only go down to 0.25mm
and in the world of sub quarter of a millimetre lines this would really show./..( and I would know and be irritated by it!)
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In a previous life I had done some railway locomotive building ( as well as collecting locomotives... )
The British pre-war company LNER...( London North Eastern Railway ) in the 1920's and 1930's painted their locomotives in a handsome apple green livery
with the boiler bands picked out in white and black....
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AHA !
I had some old decals of this lining left over from way back then in 00 Gauge ( 1/76 scale-==> (4mm = 1 ft )
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I hatched the plan of aligning the edge of the white portion of the white/black/white decal with the edge of the white part pf the hull
as a consistent spacer so as to get the parallel black/white line....
and as old as these elderly decals were ( 30 odd years plus) tested out --and found they were still in fine order....
alas rather too chunky !
I then devised a new plan....
... that if I used decals of this pattern at
half the scale ( UK N gauge ) 2 mm = 1/ft -- 1/148 ....
I might get away with it....?!
apologies for fuzzy out of focus image-- but you can see what I was aiming at on the 4 mm scale variant!
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In reality this was trickier than one may think--as the slight compound curves of the hull did made me work for it!
anyhow-- considering the model is only 4 1/4 inches loa ( 110 mm )
at 1/1 scale viewing it looks pretty good and ' in-scale / proportion '
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The mooring line eye fairleads and roller apertures were cut in and framed using very small pieces of brass scraps
Overall the effect is reasonably pleasing
(or...--it will be when I have ironed out the not quite perfect finish ( !!)and colour match...)!
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This steamer has many pitfalls for the unwary... differing numbers of Portholes starbord to Port being just one of them .
conveniently outlined with a white line... (!)
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I have during this time been working away quietly on the Fwd bridge structure-
-which is surprisingly complex.
an early stage...
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( which had most bits removed and remade / replaced after this photo... )
a little bit later
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The bridge wing railings had smart white dodgers in white canvas...
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Above the white dodgers there were mounted some small poles to which were attached
another small dodger - in a slightly darker shade of canvas -- that could be raised/lowered to give additional shelter from headwinds and spray
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I think that the angled tails of the dodger were folded / flaked or rolled ...I believe--
as their length does seem vary from one photo to another of the real 1/1 scale thing... !!
I made the uprights and the top of the small dodger, to go above the main dodger ,
using small pieces of stainless steel railing trimmed to size...
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Once these were tacked on with sticky matt varnish ...
when adjusted to be square and symmetrical -- backfilled with small amounts of CA glue for strength
and lastly in-filled with thinned white glue to simulate the canvas ( as per the main Dodgers as well)
and painted a slightly creamier shade
once dry--the effect was quite pleasing --
(the uprights will have a line spanned on them nearer completion )
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Other small components that have been made in readiness...
were the various water tanks and deck boxes
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skylights x 2
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to which were added the lids with portholes ( cut from a piece of scrap larger scale perforated floor PE.... of unknown source...)
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the deck house abaft the fwd funnel
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The 2 x funnel bases were repainted from white / grey to all brown according to the recently acquired ariel photo
and had a chunky overhanging beading of wire added to the fwd base only according to aforementioned photo...)
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and -- gratifyingly... I managed to stretch some brown sprue into a
flat section--
which allowed me to cut and form the margin planks around the paddle boxes
-- a distinctive feature again identifiable in the above mentioned photograph!
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for some light relief.... I carried on making more of the seemingly endless small cowl vents --
using a cored( easy to centre the drill in ) solder which I have owned since I was a small child-with-soldering-iron... (

!)
This solder is almost 50 years old and has shown no signs whatsoever of oxidising or degradation in all that time.
....and has been used hardly ever for actually soldering !
-- but has yielded many dozens of small cowl vents over the years !!
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and lastly for this update-- for an easy , sharp and speedy result ... the walkways on the paddleboxes...
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more soon
JIM B